Give SBA Credit for Honesty

The Small Business Administration released an annual report on the amount of federal contract dollars that go to small firms. The 2007 fiscal year total was $83.2 billion (a record dollar amount, but a decrease from the year before and short of its goals).

The honesty part comes in agency administrators admitting large gaps still exist in data accuracy. They say significant progress is being made, but that upward of $10 billion a year in errors results from miscoded contracts.

The Governing Executive story notes that with six million annual contract actions, a 1% error rate would result in 60,000 mistakes. Read the story here.

All we can say is let’s try and accelerate that improvement. Those are some big numbers to be making mistakes with.